Here, language is never simply language, after all. Bangla is the emotional foundation of Bangladesh’s statehood and not just a language for communication. This is why Islamabad’s outreach in Bangla seems to be a geopolitical appropriation of poetry: tasteful, strategic, and just clumsy enough to draw attention from Dhaka to Delhi.Cynics might refer to it as performance, while historians might call it progress.Inconveniently, both may be right.